There Are Sweet Potatoes
Beyond The DMZ.
“You know, when I eat these sweet potatoes…” My mother has a way of saying her words in English, as if they are too big for her mouth. She has to cut them up into small bite-sized pieces — “poe-tae-toes.”
“…when I eat these sweet potatoes, it always makes me remember when I was a little girl,” she recounts, while slicing up the bright orange sweet potato I had just taken out of the toaster oven. My mother rarely comes by my house, but I am sick and she insisted on bringing me a vat of galbi-tang. I didn’t even try to resist. There is something akin to an “all-cure” inside my mother’s hands when I am sick. Perhaps it is because she has been a nurse my entire life, and I always associated affection and care (the word she often used instead of the awkward sounding “love”) with that side of her.
“Why?”
“Because,” she explains, while holding out a gooey orange morsel. “Because,” she reiterates. “These were the best food.”
“What do you mean, the ‘best food’?” In my mind, the list of “best food” included “steak,” “fried chicken,” “Chicago style deep dish pizza,” “donuts.” It did not include “sweet potatoes.”
“When we were refugees,” she answers between mouthfuls, expertly peeling the skin off another stringy piece, before popping it into her mouth.
“Wait. When you guys got to South Korea?” I ask. I realize that I actually know very little about my mother’s childhood. Other than the few snatches of conversation I have managed to gather over the years, most of what I “know” is nestled between myth and fog. This was the first I’d ever heard her talk about what it was like shortly after escaping North Korea.
“M-hmmm,” she says from inside another mouthful of yam. “We had nothing. Nothing. So, the people in that village, they would harvest these” she holds up what is left of her potato in my face “and then give us what they had left over. And we would eat them just like this,” she finishes, while sucking her fingers. And I believe her, maybe more than I’ve ever believed anything else she’s ever said to me, because she isn’t looking at me when she explains these things. My 4'11", 90 lb mother is too busy cleaning her plate.
“And then, afterwards, I would run over to the field and dig up whatever I could find, you know, just a small piece,” she shows me the underside of her hand, then, which has been her sign for “tiny” for as long as I can remember. “That was the way we lived back then.”
She pauses to look up at me.
“That’s why, when I retire, I want to serve.
I want to serve that village. They were so good to us.”
I take the dish she had been eating from. I bring it over to my sink and rinse it before placing it in the dishwasher. I show her the Chanel hat I bought a few weeks back and tell her she can wear it whenever she wants because it suits her. I tell her she is beautiful — that her skin is perfect, that I wish I had her nose instead of Daddy’s, that she should grow out her hair — the way she had it when she was my age.
